Openings: The Connection Direct

Personal Notes on Poetics

Openness

Poetry is not a circumstance of language. Rather, any possible circumstance of
language is a possible circumstance of poetry. It is the job of the poet to
invest that circumstance with energy. It is the job of the receiver to be
open-minded about what circumstances of language may constitute poetry. This is
the exact analogue of the idea that the domain of music is anything which may
be heard, or that the domain of the visual arts is anything which may be seen.
The page may be a wall or a computer screen or a street or a floor with words
glued together in a pile so that not all of them can be read. This is not meant
in any way to disparage the traditional page. If there can be such a thing as
a conscientious avant garde, then surely its purpose must be to expand
the field of possibilities for making art, not to replace the existing set of
possibilities with a new one, equally narrow. The house of poetry has room for
everyone.

Energy Transactions

It is a common stereotype that the arts "are" communication processes.
Communication is a wonderful thing; no one should put it down. Like love, it
doesn't always happen when you want it to. What is pernicious in the arts is
the view that when communication has failed, all has failed, that there is
nothing but communication. In fact there is a layer that underlies
communication: the energy transaction layer. The artist is presumably a
person who is able to take energies and make them available in concentrated
form. The receiver is presumably someone with certain energy needs. What is
important is that the transaction take place: that the energy is transferred.
(What the energy "is", where it comes from, how it works -- these are all
questions on which we will all, of course, differ.) Where the artist has an
exactly clear view of just how the energy transaction should take place, and it
does in fact take place that way, then we call this communication.

But imagine you have just walked into an art gallery. All about the space are
works that you don't understand at all. You find them irritating, perhaps
infuriating. You "get nothing" from them. You walk out of the gallery in
complete disgust. The artist has not communicated with you at all -- you are
certain of this. Then a strange thing begins to happen. You begin to notice
that somehow, you are simply seeing much more sharply than you usually
do. You find yourself at a heightened state of attention. You find your
thoughts making connections that hadn't happened before. Your life seems
suddenly more clear. As opposed to that dreadful mess in the gallery!

This is the energy transaction at work -- in a way that perhaps neither artist
nor viewer "intends" or understands. And yet, by being energized, by being
brought to a heightened state of attention, something useful has happened in
your life. Something useful to you. Not an injection or gift of someone
else's wisdom, but a connection that was there for you to make all along,
something entirely yours, a connection that sprang forward with the impetus of
the energy of the works in the gallery. Let us admit that communication
failed here, but the energy transaction worked.

The artist is one person, but there are many potential receivers. Simple
arithmetic announces who is important here: the receivers! For an artist
interested in energy transactions, the purpose of art is to jog the receiver so
that resources already there in the receiver's mind are brought together
in a productive way. You may not like this idea. You may find it like asking a
question and being greeted by another question in response. You may wish
for an injection from somewhere outside of yourself. If you do, you may not be
happy with an energy that operates on your own resources without giving you new
ones.

Communication, by definition, means being specific about what energy
transactions can take place. But an art which focuses on the energy transaction
layer itself as the primary layer should seek to maximize the energy
transactions that can take place. This means the artist should not stand in the
way of her/his own energy transactions. For an artist who is not specific about
what energy transactions should take place, there is no "thing" to be
communicated.

The distance away from the energy transaction layer at which an artist wishes
to place the focus is an artistic variable; like any other artistic variable
the artist may choose to vary it over a life's work or within a single work or
not at all; the artist may seek to make it clear or ambiguous, or even "flip"
as our perceptions can flip when viewing an optical illusion.

Sometimes the energy transactions do not come off, but a third party can help
to bring them about. This is the proper role of criticism. This is the
only proper role of criticism. Critics who actively seek to prevent
energy transactions from taking place because they consider them of no value
are harm-doers performing destructive acts, and should be labelled as
such, like other vandals.

Non-Possessiveness

The communication stereotype goes hand in hand with the compulsion to
possess "the thing communicated". Possessiveness carried to extremes can
have unpleasant side effects. In order to best receive works intended to
operate primarily in the energy transaction layer, it may be necessary for the
receiver to make the effort to be purged of possessiveness. Some potential
receivers will not want to do this. They will find the work difficult. The work
may indeed be difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as giving up
possessiveness.

Imagine you are in a primeval rain forest, surrounded by sights and sounds that
are completely unfamiliar. All at once the most amazing bird you have ever seen
flies by. Its irridescent colors look like nothing you've ever seen. Alas, you
see the bird only for an instant, for a flash so brief you can hardly be sure
you saw it. Then it's gone. Perhaps you will feel that you simply must
get a full unobstructed view of that bird. You go crashing through the forest
trying to find it. You become manic about it.

Or perhaps you beome very still, surrendering to whatever the forest chooses to
show you. You would be thrilled to see the bird again. But you know you may
not. You are energized by that one brief moment of having seen it, as you try
to be energized by every moment the forest has to offer. You move through the
forest slowly, becoming part of it. You see all of it, even though of course
you see only a tiny part of it.

Which strategy is more likely to get you another sighting of that bird?

Non-Linearity

Alas, McLuhan got it exactly backwards: speech is an inherently linear medium,
writing is a medium with an inherently non-linear potential. We think of
writing as linear only because writing is such a young thing, we haven't
figured out yet how to tap even a fraction of its power; mostly we use it as
simply an alternative medium for nearly the same languages as are used for
speech. I.e. the supposed linearity of writing comes simply from a lack of
inventiveness in using writing only for the same kind of language that might be
spoken. So we must begin by understanding the linearity of speech. (Or Sign,
for that matter; the issues for both are identical.)

Speech is an activity in which speaker and listener are constrained by the
requirement that comprehension must take place in real-time. (But word-time is
not quite real-time -- it has an oddly retroactive character. We "hear"
what the mind has retroactively decoded from the previous so many fractions of
a second as though we were hearing it exactly as it happened.) It is the
inexorable linearity of time which makes speech linear. (Or makes
peformance of any kind linear, for that matter.)

A simple model for language would have the listener decode the message by going
through a series of states; the rules for language would tell, based on what
was heard and the current state, what the next state would be. This model has
the virtue that it requires very little storage: the listener must only
remember the current state. This kind of model is known as a finite state
machine. It is known that there are serious limits to the complexity of
structure that can be built with finite state machines. (In particular, a
finite state machine cannot handle "self embedding" structures. A sentence that
has another sentence in the middle of it, e.g. "His statement that he has
nothing to hide will not wash, and I told him so", is a self-embedding
structure.)

Only fairly simple languages can be handled by the model of a finite state
machine. When more complexity is required, we will need a model with a much
more exacting requirement for storage. Sentences in natural languages
require the listener to fit together pieces of what is heard that may be widely
separated in time. The method by which cues are embedded in speech as to
how the storage should operate is called syntax. You could say that syntax is
"speech's way out" of the linearity imposed by time.

But writing is vastly different. First, there is no constraint imposed by time.
The reader may reread -- or skip around -- as many times as needed to feel
comfortable. Second, a written document, unlike a spoken performance,
contains its own storage. The storage burden does not fall so completely
on the reader as it falls on the listener. In writing, space replaces time as
the fundamental dimension-set for text as opposed to speech. Complex links
between parts of a written text separated in space may simply be drawn
directly. The method of directly, graphically linking the pieces of text
connected by a relationship can be used for syntax itself: Direct Access
Communication -- as opposed to speech, which may be called Synchronous
Sequential Access Communication.

And yet we seldom find works written to directly exploit these capabilities.
Instead, writing tends to be used merely to freeze-dry speech. No wonder there
is such a strong feeling in the poetry community that the spoken word is the
primary medium, has far more power than writing, that to know what a poet is
"really up to" you have to hear the poet read. We haven't yet learned to
start writing.

Hypertext

The term "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson more than two decades ago to
describe a way of organizing text aided by a computer that allows the reader to
follow links as well as simply "read forward". "Traditional hypertext" allows a
non-linear organization to be superimposed on an otherwise linear document. Or
pushed one step further it allows a non-linear organization to be imposed on a
locally linear substrate.

Hypertext does not go nearly far enough. The non-linearity should be extended
all the way down into the fine structure of language. Syntax itself can operate
through the same kinds of operations as the hypertext link.

Interactivity

Hypertext is interactive in that the user makes choices concerning which
links to follow. In some hypertexts the user may additionally create
links as desired; other hyptertexts are "read-only": the user may follow links
but not create them. For read-only hypertexts, interactivity is mainly
concerned with navigating the link space of the hypertext. There are
numerous unresolved questions in hypertext that are the subject of lively
investigation. How best should links be created? How can the structure of the
link space be presented to the user without the user getting lost?

Hypertext-like navigation can be used with direct access communication to
achieve a virtual page of arbitrary size and complexity.

Navigation is of course only the simplest thing that may be done with
interactivity. Interactivity may be used to allow the user to change the entire
structure of the text. Interactive text can be said to behave; the only
limits to the possible degrees of complexity of this behavior are the general
limits to the complexity of behavior of computer programs. (See below, "the
animate object".)

Juxtaposition (= Structural Zero)

The use of juxtaposition -- superimposing elements with no structural
relationship whatever -- is taken for granted as a possible artistic device in
music and the visual arts. In poetry it presents a very profound problem.
Juxtaposition is structural zero. To paraphrase Cage's old critique of the
twelve-tone system, syntax is a vocabulary of structural descriptions which has
no zero. In a traditional sentence, every word has a structural role, every
word has a structural relationship to every other word by virtue of where each
word is in the syntactical structure. It is not possible to have a sentence in
traditional languages where words are just "there together" with no structural
relationship at all. So the poet wrestles with a difficult dilemma: forego
juxtaposition, or forego syntax.

In direct access communication, the burden of syntax is removed from the words
and carried by the medium itself, through direct links, be they graphical on
paper or hypertext links. This allows the use of juxtaposition and the
kinds of structuring provided by syntax. The syntax of direct access
communication is a syntax that allows for zero, that allows for elements that
are juxtaposed without structure to be combined into a larger structural whole.
The dilemma over the use of juxtaposition is solved. Syntax becomes an option
but not an obstacle.

Syntax with All Slots Open

A visual, diagrammatic syntax is a syntax with all slots open. Any point can be
connected to any other point just by drawing the link. Poetry is given the
openness that has been taken for granted in the other arts for decades, without
giving up the richness that syntax provides as a vocabulary of structural
descriptions.

The ability to draw syntactic links directly makes easy for direct access
communication syntactical possibilities that are difficult or impossible for
traditional grammars. Example: the feedback loop. Feedback loops are among the
most ubiquitous and fundamental structures in nature. They are also notoriously
nasty for theories to deal with. Traditional grammars do not allow for feedback
loops. There may be a loop in the sense that a grammatical rule is
revisited, but in mapping out the syntactical parts and their relationship to
one another an actual element of a sentence is not structurally
revisited. But the openness of a diagrammatic syntax makes this easy. A link
indicating a predicate may end up back at an element that's part of the complex
being predicated. The eye can see there is a loop, can take in the whole loop
as a structure. Things lead back: we all know sometimes life works this way.

A grammar permitting feedback loops would be impossible for a computer to deal
with. The computer would hang in the loop, would not realize there is a loop,
would be able to form no gestalt for the loop as a whole. Even the mind would
have trouble with a feedback loop in the medium of speech: the linearity of
time makes it too hard to go back, and back again, and form the gestalt of a
loop.

Another structure made easy in direct access communication is the internal
link. An internal link is a link between an element and a larger complex in
which that element participates. (This is a form of loop, actually.) Consider a
clause, and the relationship between the noun and the whole clause. That
relationship itself -- the role the noun plays in the clause -- is not
available in traditional syntax as a syntactical element. But in a visual
syntax, an internal link is as easy to draw as an external link.

Vocabularies

The historical "first problem" for computer poetry has been how to get the
words into the computer. Of course this won't be a problem much longer:
computers will all come with good dictionaries, the words will already be
there. But in the past, to use a computer with poetry has meant first getting
the words into the machine. But putting all the words of a natural
language into the machine is a huge undertaking. So the computer poet had to
first give the computer a vocabulary, a vocabulary more restricted than
the whole of the language, more restricted than the totality of words the poet
knows. This has been a major stumbling block for many poets who might otherwise
have worked with computers. The nasty word here is "restricted". Poets do not
like feeling restricted. "Vocabulary" is not a conception many poets find
congenial with their poetics. (Jackson Mac Low comes to mind as an example of
someone who, to the contrary, has worked with vocabularies as an element of his
poetics for decades, computer or no computer.)

Is a vocabulary a "closed form" (in the Olson sense)? At least one vocabulary
everyone knows is (trivially) not a closed form: the entire language. If
the entire language is a closed form then the term "closed form" makes no
distinction so we should quit talking about it: everything would be a
closed form. So the question must be rephrased: How small must a vocabulary be
before it becomes a closed form? We will differ on the answer to this, of
course. Personal view: a vocabulary can be amazingly small and still be an open
form. That is the hard part, of course: composing a vocabulary which is small
but still open.

We should not be bashful about small numbers. (Robert Duncan always said he
couldn't count beyond five.) A vocabulary "composed small" will induce
repetition in the works composed from it in a way which is musical but not
overt.

Precomposition

Precomposition -- composing, prior to creating the visible/audible/readable
"ultimate elements" of a work, a "layer" which affects the entirety of the
final work -- is a venerable concept. Visual artists have been doing it for
centuries. I.e. the woods had to be scoured for materials to be ground into
pigments and a canvas had to be stretched and material prepared for gesso and
primer coats applied and then undercoats applied -- all before a single square
millimeter of the final surface was "painted". Composers, particularly
electronic composers, have practiced precomposition extensively. But for some
reason, the concept of precomposition seems to be in poor favor among poets.
It's as if we are still struggling with a ghost of romantic idealism about the
act of composing poetry that looks on precomposition as dirty, somehow. Allen
Ginsberg has written explicitly about the act of composition, a kind of
real-time theory of composition. Again, the morbid fear of the specter "closed
form" haunts the landscape.

Is an arena a closed form? Is the page? The primed surface of a canvas? (That
last one sounds silly, of course.) Poets should not be bashful about borrowing
methods from the other arts. Why not have layered operations that affect
the entirety of subsequent layers in the composition of the poem?

The idea that all writers face the same blank page at the outset is a truism.
But with computers and precompositional techniques it isn't even true: one can
start with a full page, and then the poet's work is to empty most of
it.

Evolution

The cycle: words are eaten, become compost for the next generation, become the
food for pages that spring to life full, not empty. Like evolution in nature,
chance may be used but is not the whole story. (Chance and mechanism both exist
in nature, typically in close confines.)

Cut-up is a venerable technique. Cut-up usually means cutting up someone
else. Another approach is to cut up oneself, to compose for the
cut-up (precompositionally): poet as builder of the forest, the whole forest,
creator of the evolution game and all of the pieces. One's words take on a
different value if you know that "failed" lines will be eaten and plowed back
into the next generation, that successful lines are the survivors.

Objects

Many poets have written about objects. (Some who have ended up wishing they
hadn't.) Computer technology changes completely the "objecthood" of words. On
the computer screen, the comparison of moving words with physical manipulation
of things which can be held in the hand is simply inescapable. Just as physical
objects may be found in the landscape, the poet may find word objects in an
arena in which they are, by whatever combination of artistic choice and
algorithmic mechanism suits the poet's poetics, presented by surprise. (What an
irony that chance becomes just one among many classes of algorithm, that the
pseudo-random is programmed. Random number generators have their chapter in
Knuth, just like searching and sorting algorithms.)

But the meaning of the word "object" is itself changing. Object has
become a technical buzzword in computing. (Such buzzwords now seem to work
their way into the general language with frightening speed.) In the computer
concept of object, the nounishness of the object is receding in importance;
object becomes the cluster of verbs that make sense when applied
to the object, with noun properties along for the ride but opaque, unobservable
but through the action of verbs. The object becomes the animate object:
it behaves. Whole new galaxies of animate word objects await creation.

In the animate object, juxtaposition becomes invitation: the computer may be
used to define logical and physical space allowing phrases to be juxataposed
and still individually accessible; presentation of the juxtaposed elements may
be part of an animate word object's behavior. This type of juxtaposition may be
and or or: the poet may be inviting the reader to choose any one
of the elements offered, or may be offering the cluster of all of them as a
single entity, that each one and the next one and the next one
are all there together. Structural zero becomes an empty container filled by
participation of the reader.

Evolution: new species in the word forest, an infinity of possibilities. An
arena with structure that is still open, that behaves, that invites.